


Anywhere I Go (There You Are)

by muchmorethanaprincess



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: F/M, Grounder AU, Grounder Bellamy Blake, In Your Eyes AU, Soul Bond
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-15
Updated: 2016-03-15
Packaged: 2018-05-26 10:57:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,407
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6235981
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/muchmorethanaprincess/pseuds/muchmorethanaprincess
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>BFF fill for "I was wondering if you could do an 'In your eyes' (2014 film) bellarke fic, maybe when one of them lives on the ark and the other is a grounder? I love that film and can't find any fics for it" For valar-adorehaeris</p>
            </blockquote>





	Anywhere I Go (There You Are)

**Author's Note:**

> Knowledge of the movie is not necessary to understand this fic! 
> 
> Title from the song "Fire and the Flood" by Vance Joy.

The first time Clarke can remember it happening, she’s nine years old and in time-out for talking back to her mother. A chill runs through her, which isn’t so extraordinary – Alpha Station maintains a livable temperature better than most of the other stations, but the system does still struggle occasionally.

But she blinks, and when she opens her eyes, she’s not staring at the gray metal wall of her tiny bedroom. Instead, she’s looking at towering trees, branches covered in fluffy white snow, and she’s not looking at the from below, the way she might have imagined it, but from inside. Her vantage point has her perched halfway up a tree. She blinks again several times, shaking her head, but the image stays. She looks down, and _that_ was a mistake, because her stomach jolts, her heart stops, and she jumps in fright, losing balance.

Then she’s falling, hands reaching out to catch branches on the way down, except they’re not _her_ hands. They’re larger and darker than her own, and they can’t quite manage to actually stop the fall, but they do slow it. And then she, _they_ , whoever it is, is hitting the ground, _hard_ , and the forest disappears.

 

It doesn’t happen again for a few years, and the next time, it’s simpler. Clarke’s reading an old romance novel on her tablet, and then suddenly she’s not. She’s looking down at a _real_ book, old and worn, yellowed pages, and that same pair of large brown hands.

She lifts a hand, and they do too, turning it over to look from the back to the palm. She thinks it must be a boy’s hands, strong and calloused, not at all small and delicate and tender like her own. Still, his fingers are long and she thinks they’re beautiful. She immediately wants to draw them.

She shifts her gaze back to the book, which is open to the beginning of a section, the heading of which reads, “Part Four: The Heroes of the Trojan War.”

So, English, at least. Whoever this is, if he’s real, is obviously not on the Ark, but at least he speaks English.

“Pride and Prejudice?” a voice, deep and gravelly, asks, and it sends a zing through her body, which she feels strangely connected and disconnected to at the moment. She hadn’t really thought of _talking_.

“Yeah?” she says back, because that’s what’s open on her tablet.

But before anything else can happen, there’s a voice outside the cabin (Clarke hadn’t even looked up to realize they were _in_ a cabin) shouting in a choppy language she doesn’t understand, and the vision cuts out, just like that.

She’s back in her apartment, Wells looking at her in confusion.

“Sorry, did I say something?”

Wells just tilts his head at her, the frown that always makes him look like an old soul tugging at the corner of his mouth.

Clarke shrugs. “I must have dropped out for a second.”

 

That’s how she starts thinking of it, after it’s happened a few more times. Dropping out. For a second, sometimes a couple minutes. But it always happens like that, in small slices, little fractions of time when she’s not really sure what’s going on.

It feels real, but it can’t _possibly_ be real. She can’t have some kind of weird brain connection to some random person. Some person who appears to be living _on the ground_. Which isn’t possible, because there are no people on the ground. So she shakes it off as strange dreams, even though that’s really not how it feels, and they happen infrequently enough that she can mostly just pretend they don’t happen.

When she finds out that the Ark’s life support is dying, her first thought is, “What if earth is survivable?” Which makes no sense, because she has no reason to think that earth is survivable again, except… except for the little blips in her consciousness, that show her a boy whose face she’s never seen living there.

But still, people should be considering the possibility, right? Her mother should be considering the possibility.

 

But her mother doesn’t consider the possibility, and Clarke watches as her father is floated. She’s taken to lockup immediately after.

She doesn’t “meet” Bellamy until a week later.

She’s pacing back and forth in her cell, bored out of her fucking mind, when she drops out for a second.

Suddenly she’s standing in a group of three other people, sunshine bright and warm around her.

They’re talking, smiling, and if it was any other normal day that Clarke was dropping out like this, she would have left it alone, simply observed as she always did.

But she’s been in solitary for a week now, and she already feels like she’s going crazy. She’s more lonely than she could have ever imagined being.

So she just goes for it. She clears her throat. If this is all in her head, at least there’s no one here to hear her sounding insane.

“Can you hear me?” she asks.

He jumps, just a little.

“Oh my god, you can!” She laughs. She’s probably hysterical, but she’s so fucking relieved.

His glance, _their_ glance, swings around. They’re in a clearing, but there’s thick forest surrounding them. She’d be struck by the beauty of it, but the only thing she can manage to care about is human contact.

“Oh my god, if you can hear me, will you talk to me? Will you please talk to me?”

He shakes his head as if to clear it, but turns to the people around him and makes an excuse to leave.

She’s jumping up and down in excitement while he walks toward the trees, until he interrupts her.

“Are you jumping? Holy shit stop jumping, you’re making me dizzy.”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she says, smiling for the first time since her dad was floated. “I’m just, wow, it’s so good to hear someone’s voice, and you have a really nice voice too. All rough and deep. Really nice.”

He laughs. That’s nice too.

“Are you okay?” he asks.

She sighs, back to reality for a moment. “Not really. I’m so lonely, I just need someone to talk to. So, talk to me?”

“You got a name?”

“Yeah, I’m Clarke.”

“Speaking of which, you’re a real person?”

She laughs. “Yeah. I mean as far as I know. You’re real?”

“Far as I know,” his deep voice replies. “I’m Bellamy.”

“Bellamy,” she says, turning the name over in her mouth. “But you’re… you’re on the ground?”

“The ground?” he asks. “What do you mean?”

“Like, Earth.”

“Where else would I be?”

“Stuck in solitary confinement on a space station that’s dying,” she grumbles, kicking at the wall.

It’s a weird sensation, to be able to see where he is, but also where she herself is. To feel the warmth of the day around him, but also the chill of her skybox cell.

“That’s where you are?” he asks.

“Yep,” she pops her lips on the “p.”

“I’m not gonna lie,” he says. “You sound like the one who’s not real in this situation.”

She scoffs. “We’ve been told that the ground is uninhabitable our whole lives. How are you not dead? The radiation is supposed to be lethal for like, a hundred more years.”

She can’t see him shrug, but she _feels_ it, sort of.

“It’s probably still affecting us. Some people are born with mutations. But we’re still here.”

“Huh.”

They’re quiet for a moment.

“Do you think we can control this… this thing?” she asks. She tries not to sound desperate.

“I don’t know, we never have before. Wait, it was you that this was happening with before, right?”

“I think so? Um, was it you in the tree that day? I was nine, so it was almost eight years ago. And we fell?”

“Yes!” Bellamy shouts, then quiets quickly. “Oh my god, that was so embarrassing. My people, we pretty much live in the trees, for me to fall out of one for no explainable reason, god I was mortified.”

Clarke looks down at her left arm, the scar still there from when the bone snapped and cut right through her flesh. Then her vision cuts back, and she’s looking at Bellamy’s arm, which has the same scar, the raised white line a jagged contrast against his brown freckled skin. Hers blends more, with her pale skin, but she can see that they match, almost exactly.

“You broke your arm that day too?” he asks.

“Yeah, my mom was so confused about how I could have broken it so badly when I was just sitting in our apartment. I told her I fell off the bed, but it still didn’t make sense. Because we…”

“We fell out of a tree,” Bellamy finishes.

“Okay so, when else?” she asks.

“Reading?”

“Reading,” Clarke agrees.

“But you read on a screen,” Bellamy says.

“And you read real books,” Clarke chimes in. “You like mythology and history—”

“And you like novels,” he finishes. “And there were lots of flashes of—you have a friend, a black kid your age, right?”

“Yes! Wells, my best friend Wells. Or,” she catches herself, the excitement wearing off quickly. “He was.”

“What happened? Does it have to do with why you’re locked up?”

She nods, assumes that he can feel it, the way she felt his shrug.

“I mentioned that our ship is dying? The system that provides our clean oxygen is broken, so we’re running out. We’ve got a year or so left. I only know this because my dad was one of the lead engineers. He found the flaw, and he wanted to go public about it. He thought if the people knew about it that they could… that we could… find a way to fix it, or come together or something. Anyway, I told Wells. He promised to keep the secret, but then my dad was getting floated and—”

“Floated?” Bellamy interrupts.

“Oh yeah, sorry, that’s what we call it when someone is executed here. They put you in an airlock and then open it, let you float out into space.”

“Wait, your dad was _executed_? For finding out that you’re all going to die up there?” He sounds horrified. She’s kind of glad to hear it, honestly.

“The council told him not to share the information, and he was going to disobey them. Here on the Ark, if you’re over 18 and you break any law, no matter how small, they float you.”

“Christ.”

“And they locked me up, because they knew I would go public with it too. The only reason I haven’t been floated is because I’m 17. So yeah, Wells told. I thought I could trust him, but I was wrong.”

“When did this happen?” Bellamy asks.

“A week ago.”

“I felt it,” Bellamy says quietly.

“What?”

“I think I felt it, your emotions when it happened, and after, your pain. I felt it. It woke me up in the middle of the night, like someone was punching me in the gut. I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t figure out why I felt like the world had dropped out from under me. But it was you, wasn’t it? It’s because that’s what you were feeling. And this whole week, I’ve felt lonely and depressed, even with people, and I couldn’t figure out why. But it was you.”

“Yeah, that was probably me. I wonder if that’s happened before. Oh my god!”

“What?”

“ _Oh my god_. Oh my god!”

“What?” Bellamy demands impatiently.

“A few months ago I—” she laughs. “This is unbelievable. I had an orgasm in the middle of class, oh my god that was you!” she accuses.

He laughs. “Maybe?”

“It was totally you! God, it was so weird, I was just sitting there and I got aroused for no reason and I couldn’t figure it out and I couldn’t stop it, but it was you! You were having sex, weren’t you?”

“Probably.” She can hear the smirk in his voice.

“You were! It was uh, a dark-haired girl, her hair was cut to her chin and braided around her face, right? Her skin’s darker than mine, but lighter than yours.”

“How do you know that?”

“I saw her, I guess. I must have thought the flashes were just me fantasizing because I was so worked up but no, that’s the girl you were with.” Clarke laughs. “I had to sit there in the middle of class pretending to be totally normal while I had a spontaneous orgasm.”

Bellamy laughs with her, and it feels like a balm for her loneliness. She sighs in relief.

“You like girls?” he asks, drawing her out of her thoughts.

“Huh?”

“You said you thought the girl was your own fantasy.”

“Oh. Yeah. I like girls and guys. I like both.”

She feels Bellamy nod.

“You think this time is lasting longer because we’re actually aware of it?” he asks.

“I don’t know. I hope so. I’m going to be stuck in here for almost another year, and I’ve been going crazy after only a week. If I can’t talk to you… let’s just not consider it.”

Bellamy’s been walking as they talk, and at that moment, he walks into a small village, mostly cabins and some stables that she can see.

And then the connection between them drops out, and she’s alone in the middle of her cell again.

“Damn it.”

 

It’s three more days of silence before they drop in on each other again. (That’s how Clarke thinks of it now - not dropping out of her world, but dropping into his.) Three awful, torturous days.

She sits in her tiny cell, trying not to go insane but sometimes mumbling, “Bellamy, Bellamy, Bellamy,” almost without noticing.

When they finally drop in again, she nearly leaps off her tiny mat and blanket that makes up her bed.

“Yes! Yes!” she shouts.

“Jesus,” Bellamy mutters. “Nothing gentle about that, damn.”

“Sorry, sorry, I just need to not be alone, thank god. I was starting to think it might be months before this happened again.”

“Well here I am,” he says. He sounds tired.

She blinks, focusing on his environment for the first time.

He’s in a cabin, settled in next to a warm fire, a heavy book in his hands. His body leans forward and back and it takes Clarke a moment, but— “A rocking chair? What are you, an old man? Oh my god, wait, how old _are_ you?”

She can’t see it, but she thinks she feels him roll his eyes.

“I’m twenty-two. But my sister calls me an old man all the time, so you’re probably not far off.”

“You have a sister?” she asks, excited for a topic to grasp onto.

“Yeah. You have any siblings?”

“No. No! No, we’re not allowed to have siblings on the Ark.”

“What?” he asks, surprised at her vehemence.

It’s easy to settle into a quiet night of talking. She explains the Ark, the single child rule, the constant rationing, the floating. He tells her about Octavia, their mother who died two years ago (Clarke realizes she felt his mourning when it happened, weeks and weeks of feeling upset for no reason at all). He tells her about life on the ground, how he’s been training as a warrior since he was a child, but he likes books and words better.

It’s simple, soft.

Bellamy starts falling asleep in the chair, and Clarke shouts his name a couple times to wake him up.

“You can’t sleep there, you’re an old man, you’ll wake up with a kink in your neck.”

He laughs softly. “Fine, fine,” he grumbles, but he doesn’t mean it.

He gets in his bed, which is larger and cozier than hers, and pulls the furs up to his chin. Clarke can _almost_ feel the comforting softness under her fingers.

They’re both asleep in less than a minute.

 

She wakes up alone, and a little disappointed. She’d kind of hoped the connection would last through the night.

It’s another two days before they drop in again, and when they do, Bellamy’s in his cabin, just like last time.

He’s tired, Clarke can tell, and she feels guilty asking him to entertain her. But she’s also been alone and trapped in a cell since the last time she… well, she didn’t _see_ him.

He doesn’t sound disappointed that they’ve dropped in, but he does heave a big sigh, and Clarke doesn’t want to be demanding, so when Bellamy asks, “What do you want to talk about?” Clarke says, “Can we just read?”

“Sure, princess.”

“Princess?” she asks, a little miffed.

“Yeah, you’ve got that whole ‘locked in a tower’ thing going on.”

“Huh.”

“Plus, you mom might be a little power hungry and evil.”

She scoffs, but it’s in good fun. “My mom’s not evil.”

Bellamy pauses for a second. She can feel that he’s tense, hesitating. “How sure are you that Wells is the one who got your dad floated?”

It takes her aback for a second, the implication he’s making that it could have been Abby.

“I don’t want to think about that right now,” she says, her throat tightening.

“Okay,” Bellamy agrees, easy and soothing, like he has no expectations for her.

And then his low, rumbling voice fills her head, reading to her from an old history book. It’s the most comfort she’s felt since she got locked up.

 

The next time, Bellamy’s out in the middle of nowhere at night, and when he glances up for a moment, Clarke completely flips, because she’s never seen the stars like that. She makes him stop and lay down, right in the dirt, and they stargaze, talking quietly.

Clarke nearly screams when they see a shooting star, and Bellamy laughs good-naturedly at her enthusiasm.

“Hey,” he says a few minutes later, as they’ve been watching in silence. “You feel that?”

“Feel what?”

“It’s like a… like a thread, between your mind and mine, I think. I can feel it.”

Clarke combs through her brain, searching for it, and then, “Yeah, yeah I think I’ve got it. Do you think it’s getting stronger because we’re using it?”

“Probably. Speaking of, do you know anyone else who has something like this?”

Clarke shakes her head. “No. I’ve never heard of anything like this at all. Have you?”

“I don’t know anyone, or if I do, they’ve kept quiet about it. But my people have… stories, about this kind of thing. Not always the same as what we’re experiencing, but there are legends of… soul connections,” he finishes quietly.

“Soul connections,” she repeats.

“Yeah.”

“Huh.”

 

The next day, Clarke searches for the thread, trying to notice it so she can pin it down, maybe see if she can control when she’ll drop in with Bellamy. It takes hours, but eventually she finds it (it’s a lot harder to get a hold of when he’s not already in her head)  and tries to get his attention. A few minutes later, she’s seeing through Bellamy’s eyes.

He’s in the middle of training, sparring with someone, and it gives Clarke a bit of a jolt -- Bellamy’s arms sweaty and glistening in the sun, his large hands grasping at a dark-skinned man who’s really not bad either.

And when Bellamy’s got him thrown on the ground for a moment, he mutters, “Couldn’t miss this, huh princess?” just for her to hear, and _that_ sends a jolt of arousal through her.

She brushes it aside with a weak laugh. “I was trying to make it happen. It worked!”

Bellamy ends the fight and walks off, out of earshot of the others training around them.

“Yeah, I felt you tugging on the thread, I guess? Just before you showed up.”

Clarke grins. She knows he can feel it.

“You want to go read?” he offers. “I’ve got a novel you might like.”

 

Once they’re able to mostly control it, they start dropping in every day. They can’t always get it, fumble a little sometimes, but the more they use the thread, the more familiar and easy it becomes to access.

They go through all the books Bellamy owns, and all the novels he can borrow from the people in his village.

He lets Clarke in when he’s speaking to his sister, Octavia. Clarke likes her immediately, likes watching her interact with Bellamy, though he hasn’t told her about the “soul connection” yet.

Sometimes Bellamy takes her along on his whole day, talking to her when he’s alone but otherwise just letting her observe. Though her idea of observing is making snarky comments to draw laughs from Bellamy that have the people around him shooting him strange looks. He scolds her later, but she can tell he doesn’t really mind.

When he has free days, he takes her on whatever adventure he can think of. They go horseback riding, because when Clarke sees a horse for the first time, she begs him to let her near them. She spends the whole day completely amazed, and Bellamy spends it laughing at her and the way she screams when they start galloping.

They hike up a mountain so Clarke can see the view from the peak, and Clarke sits through enough of Bellamy’s training sessions that she decides to start training on her own, just to feel strong and keep occupied. Bellamy coaches her, which is nice but often annoying, resulting in stupid, petty arguments when Bellamy makes fun of how weak she is and she yells at him about being on rations, unlike him.

It’s been a few months when she drops in during the early morning to Bellamy walking through the forest with a roughly drawn map.

“What are we looking for?” she asks, already in a good mood.

“A bunker,” he says. “Good morning, Clarke.”

“Morning, Bellamy. So, what’s in the bunker?”

“Nothing important,” he says gruffly.

“Well if there’s nothing important you wouldn’t be looking for it,” Clarke says, confused about why he wouldn’t tell her. They don’t have many secrets.

“It’s nothing,” he huffs. “You’ll see when we get there, anyway.”

But then Clarke hears a thought right across the thread.

“You’re going for books.”

Bellamy stops in his tracks.

“Was that a guess?”

“No, I felt you _think_ it!” she laughs. “We really are getting better at this.”

“Maybe I don’t want you in my thoughts. That’s unnerving,” he grumbles.

“Too late!” she says cheerfully. She sobers. “Why are you looking for books?”

Bellamy stays silent, but she feels it again. _For you_.

“Oh. For me. Well then, we’d better find this bunker.”

The bunker is positively filled with books, and Bellamy lets Clarke pick which ones she wants, packs up more than he should carry home at once.

But first they spend the whole day in the bunker, reading and talking.

 

Clarke realizes they’ve never seen each other’s faces, and suddenly she’s desperate to know what he looks likes, and for him to know the same about her.

She wants to see the curve of his smile when it lights up his face, wants to see if his eyes crinkle when he’s truly happy. She wants to see if she can make him blush, she wants to see the freckles over his cheeks and nose like on the rest of him.

And she wants him to see her, too.

But she knows she’ll never be allowed a mirror, not under any kind of normal circumstances, so she starts trying to butter up the guard who slides her meals through a cat door in her cell every day.

Bellamy laughs at her, but it’s just a _little_ difficult to flirt through a tiny hole in the wall. Plus, it’s a little ironic when she plays the “I haven’t spoken to another human in six months” card while he’s listening.

It takes a week of sweet-talking, and convincing the guard she’s not going to make a weapon out of it to hurt herself with, but then the tray sliding through the slot has a mirror on it along with her food and a note telling her to send it back at her next meal.

Clarke chokes out a “thank you” and tugs on the thread to Bellamy.

He’s in her head in an instant, and once he sees the mirror he’s scrambling around his cabin, pulling out one of his own – an old-fashioned one with a wooden handle and engraving on the back.

“You’ve had a mirror all this time?” she accuses, and he laughs.

“I borrowed it from Octavia. I was waiting until you conned the guard.” He quiets. “I figured we could see each other together.”

Clarke’s been starving for hours, but she can’t even focus on the food now with the prospect of Bellamy’s face before her.

He knows though, and he tells her she’s not allowed to see him until she eats. She whines about it, but it makes her feel warm that Bellamy cares.

She scarfs down the ration of gruel and the measly protein pack as fast as she can, and then she props the small mirror against the wall, not leveling her face with it yet. Bellamy’s holding his mirror face down, waiting for her.

“You ready?” she asks.

“Whenever you are, princess.”

She scoots forward until her face is reflected back at her, and Bellamy flips his mirror.

“Oh,” they both breathe.

It’s not that they really needed to see each other to feel any closer, but something does feel different afterward. Like they know a part of each other that they didn’t before.

They spend hours staring at each other that day, examining everything. She knows what his smile looks like now (better than she even imagined) and the warm brown of his eyes. He knows the quirk of her eyebrow when she sasses him and the way she ducks her head when she laughs.

Clarke sees the longing on his face when they fall into a quiet moment, just staring at each other, and she’s pretty sure he sees the longing on hers too.

And then her next meal comes, and she has to give the mirror back to the guard.

But she can’t forget Bellamy’s face.

 

She’s the one with the idea about sex.

They’re sitting around a campfire at a village he’s visiting with Octavia and Lincoln for trade, and she catches sight of a girl making eyes at Bellamy when he glances around.

“You should hook up with her,” Clarke says, blunt.

Bellamy chokes on his drink. “What?”

“It’s not the first time I’ve thought it,” she says, shrugging. “But your village is kind of small, I thought it might be awkward to ask you to have a one-night stand just so I can get in on it.”

Bellamy laughs. “You’re really something, you know that?”

“I know.” She grins. “Now go flirt with her.”

“You’re going to talk my ear off during this, aren’t you?”

“What, not a fan of dirty talk?”

“If I thought it was going to be dirty talk, I’d be excited, but instead I have a feeling you’re just going to be giving me instructions the whole time.”

“You don’t like being told what to do?” she asks, lowering her voice to a sultry rasp.

Bellamy groans.

“I promise I’ll behave, please please please.”

So Bellamy goes to flirt with her, and she brings him back to her cabin. Clarke does fall into giving instructions (but only because as a girl, she knows what they like, and she thinks he’s just not _savoring_ it enough) until Bellamy scolds her with a sharply thought _Clarke!_

She quiets down, except for her loud moans. But then, yeah, she can’t stop the dirty talk, which it is glaringly obvious that Bellamy enjoys, if the volume of his own moans is anything to go by.

Bellamy gets the girl off twice, Clarke gets herself off three times, and once he’s finished, he takes a minute to recover and then goes back to his own tent.

“Not big on post-coital cuddling?” she asks, when he gets in bed.

“Not with a random girl. If you were here, though…”

Clarke’s stomach flips. She tries not to read into it. Bellamy’s just had a really great orgasm, after all, he’s probably not really thinking clearly.

It still makes her feel warm all over.

 

The next night, his last night before he goes home to his own village, Clarke asks him, “You wanna do it again?”

He chuckles. “You wanna pick?”

“Yes please.”

He glances around the fire so she can see the options, and it only takes her a minute to choose a tall blond guy they’ve been seeing around.

“Nice,” Bellamy says, and stands up to approach him.

Bellamy doesn’t flirt so much as straight-forwardly present the option, and the man accepts quickly.

Bellamy gets him off with his mouth, which is great, but then he leaves. He’s polite about it, but he’s obviously still aroused, so it’s a little weird, and the guy is confused about why Bellamy didn’t let him return the favor.

Clarke is confused to, at least until he gets back to his tent and immediately tells her what to do with her hands.

“Sorry, I couldn’t focus on him when I really wanted to focus on you,” he mumbles.

“Fuck, don’t apologize for that,” she says back.

It’s a pretty great night after that. It’s only a little bittersweet that they can’t hold each other after.

 

Bellamy keeps occupying her time. His daily life is interesting enough, and he finds more little adventures for her. He takes her swimming, that’s her favorite. But her eighteenth birthday looms ever closer.

They don’t know what happens to the thread if one of them dies.

 

“What’s going to happen when the Ark runs out of oxygen?” Bellamy whispers one night. They’re both laying in bed.

“I’ll probably already be dead. My eighteenth birthday is in a month. My case will be brought before the council, they’ll choose to pardon or execute me.” She shrugs. “If things were different, I’d say I have a pretty good chance. But as they are, I’m surprised they’re even wasting air and rations on me now.”

“Shit, I forgot about your birthday,” he says, a little higher than normal. “What if they find a way to fix it? They won’t float you if they fix it, right?”

“Bellamy,” she says, trying to soothe the desperation in his voice. “I don’t know. I don’t know what they’re working on or what options they’re considering or if anything has been successful so far. I don’t know. They might float me.”

He exhales sharply. “You can’t just show up in my head, spend eight months with me and then die, Clarke.”

“You say that like I made all this happen.” She sighs. “Maybe you’re not real. Maybe you’re just a happy hallucination. Maybe I dreamed you.”

Bellamy laughs bitterly. “I’m not.”

“Well, if they do kill me, and it hurts you, I can’t bring myself to be sorry. I would have gone crazy in here without you.”

He drags his hands over his face. “As awful as it would be, I’m not sorry either.”

“At least we’re agreed that I’m worth the pain then.”

Bellamy closes his eyes so all she can see is the backs of his eyelids.

“I just feel so useless,” he whispers.

“Me too.”

 

Bellamy’s there the day before her eighteenth birthday, when the guards come. She figures the council decided to get it over with a day early.

Bellamy starts panicking, tells her to fight them off, but she knows there’s no use.

Especially when her mom is suddenly outside her cell, saying that she’s going to the ground. To test if it’s survivable. Clarke already knows it is, but.

“What part, mom? What part of Earth are we being sent to?” she asks urgently.

It takes Abby a moment, because it’s not what she was expecting.

“Um, the eastern former United States.”

Relief floods her.

“Bellamy, I’m coming. I’m on my way, Bellamy,” she whispers.

“ _Holy shit_ ,” he breathes.

Her mom looks at her, confused, but starts in on a lecture – not to be scared, to follow her instincts, something about her father – and then she feels the tranquilizer dart in her shoulder.

 

Bellamy is freaking out when Clarke comes to in the dropship.

“Oh my god, Clarke, you can’t do that again. You can’t ever die, that was, that was awful, the thread wasn’t gone it was just _dead_.”

“Bellamy, I’m fine, I was just sedated. But you—” She gets cut off by a video of Jaha, telling them where they’ll be landing, and to find Mount Weather for supplies.

“Bellamy,” she says quietly. “Will you be able to find me? Will you come find me when we land? God, what if we die when we hit the ground?”

“I’ve already got my eyes on the sky, Clarke.”

And she can see through the thread that he does.

He gathers Octavia and Lincoln, who he did eventually tell about the connection, and a few others, they get supplies-- food mostly, but blankets and clothing and medical supplies too.

Bellamy whoops when he sees the dropship, a little dot sailing through the sky, but the turbulence hits a second later, and it panics both of them.

She doesn’t know how long the terror lasts, but they hit the ground hard.

“Clarke? Are you okay?” Bellamy’s voice shakes.

She takes a breath and tries to inventory the state of her body. “I’m fine, I’m fine.”

“Oh, thank god. Okay, we saw you land, you’re probably about two hours away. We’re coming, okay? Just hold on until we get there.”

“Okay. Bellamy?”

“Yeah?”

“I can’t wait to see you.”

She feels his grin.

“Yeah, me too.”

Bellamy climbs on his horse and gallops off, his small party following him.

 

When she descends the ladder to the lower level of the dropship, she finds Wells, and also two dead boys who decided it would be fun to take off their safety harnesses while in flight.

It’s a teary reunion with Wells, with a hug that might last a few minutes.

“I know it was my mom, not you,” she sniffles.

“Clarke,” he says, as understanding and sympathetic as always.

“I’m okay, really,” she says, holding both his hands. “We have a lot to catch up on.”

When she turns away to head for the door, Bellamy’s voice sounds in her head. “I’m happy for you, princess.”

Wells stops her with her hand on the lever.

“What if the air’s toxic?”

She turns to him, grinning. “Trust me, it’s not.”

 

The kids aren’t really inclined to listen to Clarke and Wells, since they had it easy on the Ark while most of the others were lower class and struggled through daily life. But a few of them notice Clarke and Wells digging the graves for the two dead boys, and the glares change to looks of interest.

Clarke tells him about Bellamy while they work. It sounds unbelievable when she explains it, but she gets to finish with, “You’ll meet him in an hour.”

 

When Bellamy sees the dropship, she sees it too, through him. And then she’s running.

He jumps off his horse in one swift move once he sees her, while the rest of his small group continues on.

She’s in his arms before she can blink, Bellamy’s arms crushing her to his chest, her own hands holding him tightly.

“Hi.”

“Hi.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah.”

He has her backed against a tree in a moment, reaching up to cradle her face between his hands.

“It’s so good to see your face again.” He sounds like he can’t breathe. It’s pretty close to how she feels too.

“Yeah, you too.”

“So um, I just—” He swoops in, but hesitates an inch from her lips. She surges up on her toes to meet him, and it’s like lightning striking down her spine at the contact.

She grabs his wrists, drags her hands over his muscled arms and then his back as they kiss and kiss and kiss.

It takes them a few minutes to pull their mouths away from each other.

“What am I going to do with all these kids?” Clarke asks, breathing heavy.

“I’ll help.” He kisses her forehead, then her cheek. “I’ll talk to my people’s leaders. We’ll figure this out. But for now, Octavia and Lincoln have your group of criminals taken care of. So can I just pay attention to how beautiful you are for a few more minutes?”

Clarke rolls her eyes, but she can’t stop smiling. “You’re pretty beautiful yourself.”

He holds her waist, and she runs her hands through his messy hair.

“It’s just really good to touch you. I’ve been dying to do this,” she says, tugging gently.

“Yeah.” He leans his forehead against hers. “Happy birthday, Clarke,” he says, and kisses her again.

 

There’s a lot more to come. There’s the dead radio on the dropship, which means no one on the Ark knows they can survive on the ground. There’s Bellamy talking to Anya, Clarke by his side as he convinces her to support the delinquents and tries to convince her that by doing so, the Arkers won’t be a threat when ( _if_ ) they arrive. There’s Bellamy telling the kids why they can’t go to Mount Weather for supplies, because people disappear there, and his own people will take care of them instead.

There’s Raven, dropping out of the sky in a pod and radioing back to Abby that they’re almost all still alive.

There’s the Ark crashing down a month later, and that’s when most of the delinquents decide they want to join the clan by the sea.

The Ark makes digital contact with Mount Weather, and some of the Arkers want to live there. The Trikru hesitantly agrees that if those moving in will donate their blood to keep the others alive, it’s worth the potential future risk if it means no more Reapers and disappearances (although they’re all horrified to find out that’s what Mount Weather has been doing).

 

Bellamy and Clarke go to the sea with the delinquents.

 

The ocean is so much more beautiful when they’re looking at it from the same place.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Please let me know if you liked it with kudos and comments! :)


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